Friday, May 20, 2016

Orlando 48 Hour Film Project moves to July; first meetup on Saturday

The Orlando 48 Hour Film Project will be held in July this year instead of its usual August. The competition will be held July 15-17, with all the films being screened the following Friday and Saturday, and the awards screenings taking place July 29.

The first filmmaker meetup will be at Buffalo Wild Wings at Waterford Lakes, 504 North Alafaya Trail, in Orlando, on May 21 at 8 p.m. The next meetup is scheduled for May 25, at 8 p.m., at the Brickhouse Tavern + Tap at 8440 International Drive in Orlando. More meetups are planned but haven’t been announced yet. (If you’re interested in participating, the meetups are the best way to form a team, join someone else’s team or just learn more about the process.)

The event is part of the world’s largest timed filmmaking competition. Participants have just two days to write, shoot and edit a short film between four and seven minutes long. Although they can form teams, secure locations and get equipment beforehand, everything else must be done in 48 hours. And to prevent cheating, teams are given a genre (choice of two), a prop, a line of dialogue and a character name and trait at the kick-off event, which will be at Valencia College East Campus on July 15. (All the screenings will take place at the school’s Performing Arts Center.)

Orlando’s winning film will go on to compete with roughly 140 other city winners at the international contest, Filmapalooza, next year, with the top films from that event screening at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. And if you think Cannes is out of your reach, just ask Joshua Ortiz and his team, Aja on Tour, whose film, Wake Up, won Orlando last year, was judged one of the best at Filmapalooza and is now playing Cannes. Hey, sometimes in the world of film, you have to go short (and fast) to dream big.